Time to go green by ditching paper?
November 4, 2009 by Tom GuayPosted in: Cost Cutting, Green Office, Latest News & Views, News
Virtually any business can adopt green practices that cut operating expenses by eliminating one of the fundamentals of office work: paper.
Instead of handing your customers and clients oodles of reports, a key green office strategy is to digitize the paper, especially reports, legal documents and catalogs.
Producing reports in a CD format saves trees and shipping costs. A 100-pound package of paper shipped from LA to New York can run you $50. The CD equivalent is only $1.05 via first-class mail, according to E.C. Goggio, president of the digitization company, Mirror Image Media.
Goggio’s Milwaukee-based company promotes his CD services as a clean, green alternative to turning trees into paper. For example:
- Lessiter Publishing Co. saved over 1,000 trees when it produced 1,000 conference guides, materials and catalogs on CD instead of the old paper versions. The company says this eliminates 10 million pieces of paper and the greenhouse gases and other pollutants associated with paper production.
- Ziegler Wealth Management transferred legal documents for 2,000 recipients to CD instead of paper. This eliminated 72,000 pieces of paper, and
- Walter AG put its industrial catalogs on CD and eliminated 25,000 catalogs, which totaled about 7.5 million pages of paper not created.
The everyday CD can hold up to 20,000 letter-sized pages of black and white documents. Using the CD instead of paper eliminates processing of 24 trees.
Plus, storing company documents on CD is a time saver because computers quickly search for the document you need to retrieve. Goggio says that the typical worker spends an average of 150 hours a year looking for lost paper documents. That search can be done instantly with a CD-based retrieval system.
Tags: data storage, Lessiter Publishing, Mirror Image Media, Walter AG, Zielgler Wealth Management
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November 9th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Using a CD instead of paper is not always the best choice. Paper is made from trees, grown on tree farms. Paper is a renewable resource. It sequesters carbon. CDs are made from petroleum.
November 12th, 2009 at 10:33 am
A drawback with CD’s is that a mass producing them to send out, there will always be a few that are not readable — small problem but frustrating and inconvenient for the person who received it. Also, CD’s are not indestructable like some people think. Without proper handling, they can get a scratch on them that renders them useless.
What is a waste of paper is companies like JC Pennys that sends out 3 to 5 sale catalogs a week or ones that send out catalogs every two weeks where the only thing different is the cover page and maybe a few promotions.
One way we recycle paper here at our office is to use the back side of paper that has little information on the front side, i.e. daily reports that print out with pages that only have a heading and “no unusual activity *** end of report ***” or something similar. These pages work great for printing items that stay in house and for the fax machine. By the way, those daily reports are ones we have no control over what prints out — corporate office set the daily reports printing.
November 13th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
I am all about reducing paper and using electronic media. Once I have recieved a CD, I load the information onto our computer file network, and it is always available for searching and sharing with others. Another suggestion as an alternative to CD/DVD distribution is the use of SharePoint and FTP sites. The document can be posted (regardless of size), and can be shared by anyone who has been given access.
Additionally, if CDs are the only practical alternative, please be aware that they are considered a #7 plastic and are therefore recyclable. Check with your local recycling centers for the plastics that they recycle, or look to other sources for CD recycling. One place I have found for CD DVD and computer recycling is Back thru the future. They offer free recycling for CDs and DVDs.